Appearance of Impro-what?
On the conspiracy theory kick comes The Moscow Times’ “Metropolis”, a (frequently critical) column on American politics.
It’s a shell game, with money, companies and corporate brands switching in a blur of buyouts and bogus fronts. It’s a sinkhole, where mobbed-up operators, paid-off public servants, crazed Christian fascists, CIA shadow-jobbers, war-pimping arms dealers—and presidential family members—lie down together in the slime. It’s a hacker’s dream, with pork-funded, half-finished, secretly programmed computer systems installed without basic security standards by politically partisan private firms, and protected by law from public scrutiny. It’s how the United States, the “world’s greatest democracy,” casts its votes. And it’s why George W. Bush will almost certainly be the next president of the United States—no matter what the people of the United States might want.The American vote-count is controlled by three major corporate players—Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia—with a fourth, Science Applications International Corporation, coming on strong. These companies—all of them hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid—have been given billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines nationwide by the 2004 election. These glitch-riddled systems—many using “touch-screen” technology that leaves no paper trail at all—are almost laughably open to manipulation, according to corporate whistleblowers and computer scientists at Stanford, Johns Hopkins and other universities.
It’s honestly hard to swallow that the upcoming elections are already fixed by the vote counters (note that I only say “hard” and not “very difficult” or “impossible”). However, there’s a little thing called the appearance of impropriety.
Judges with only the most tenuous of connections will excuse themselves from cases just to avoid the accusation of currying favor. Most (smart) businessmen avoid investing in their own companies in order to avoid the accusation of insider trading. There’s a committee in the Senate that handles ethical issues and which has the power to censure a Senator for the appearance of impropriety. A lawyer can be disbarred for it.
It’s not a matter of doing something wrong, it’s a matter of having reason to do something wrong. Prove to us that we can trust you. Show us that you’re not biased. If you have something that could cause that bias, show us and remove yourself – because it’s going to be very hard to trust you.
So explain to me why our votes are being counted by Republican fundraisers (who promise to deliver votes to specific candidates), partisan players, Christian Reconstructionists (who want – among other things – a Christian theocracy, the death penalty for homosexuality, and the reinstitution of legal slavery), and representatives of the gun lobby. Even if they can manage to suspend their extreme political beliefs for one iota of a second, how can we trust them?
How can we put our trust in a man who promises to deliver Florida to Bush? How can we trust his company to give us a fair and accurate count?
After the last election, when we were as much as told that these companies just estimate ballpark figures and predict the count of absentee ballots, how can we trust political extremists when they tell us our vote counts?
Who do you turn to when the fox is given the key to the henhouse?